Love — kindness, affection, sensitive attunement, respect, companionship — is not only difficult to find, but is even more challenging for many people to accept and tolerate. But why do love, positive acknowledgment and compliments arouse such animosity? There are a number of primary causes of this phenomenon.

You can address the problem of being an adult by recognizing and challenging defenses and altering childish behavior patterns. Learn how to become alert to situations and personal interactions that trigger your fear of growing up and take control over negative actions that relieve or quiet the fear.

What are the the principal barriers to living an adult existence? In this blog, I explore the psychodynamics underlying the tendency to hold onto a child’s perspective despite the emotional turmoil, maladaptation, and unhappiness it creates.

Most people are unaware that they are conducting their lives more from a child’s frame of reference than in an adult mode. Although men and women mature physically and become more capable in their practical lives, rarely do they achieve emotional maturity.

Instead of playing the role of expert, the ideal therapist would strive to be an authentic person.He or she would serve as a role model for the client, demonstrating through his or her responses and behavior, how to struggle against destructive forces within the personality and how to live less defensively.

The truth is that love, by any operational definition of the word, is not only hard to come by, but it is even more difficult to accept and tolerate. Accepting love and getting close to someone else threatens our defenses and conflicts with any negative points of identity that we formed in our families.

The very defenses that once protected us as children and were appropriate to our survival emotionally can limit our life experience as adults. Being vulnerable means freeing yourself of these defenses to live it as fully as possible, to experience all of your emotions, all your perceptions, all your thoughts, all your ideas.

Researchers have observed that people tend to commit the most egregious human rights violations in their closest, most intimate associations. We are guilty of such violations when someone's love challenges our negative self-concept, and, in our desperation to defend ourselves, we disrespect their feelings and use means that are hurtful to push them away.

To varying degrees people block out important feelings and emotions, and in so doing, deviate from their true destiny. How is it that so many people spend their lives denying themselves such simple basic gratification? And why, when they are facing death, do they finally have the clarity to know what’s important to them?

I was searching for the answer to the question of why most individuals in spite of emotional catharis, understanding and intelectual insight still hold on to familiar destructive patterns of the past and refuse to change on a deep character level.

&nbsp;Power and leadership per se are obviously neither positive nor negative in and of themselves. However, the specific types of power that people tend to develop over time and the methods whereby they accumulate and utilize this power to either inspire, dominate, or destroy other people, can be evaluated from an ethical point of view.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

Sex is one of the strongest motivating forces in life. It has the potential for creating intense pleasure and fulfillment or for causing considerable pain and suffering. The effect of a natural expression of sexuality on one's sense of well-being and overall enjoyment of life cannot be over-emphasized.

Emotional hunger is not love. It is a strong emotional need caused by deprivation in childhood. It is a primitive condition of pain and longing which people often act out in a desperate attempt to fill a void or emptiness.

Several factors have been proposed to explain the gradual demise of psychoanalysis and depth therapy, including the prolonged treatment time inherent in the process, monetary considerations, the time constraints of managed care, and the increased medicalization of psychology. However, I believe that this demise is closely related to an implicit cultural movement to squelch serious inquiry into family dynamics and interpersonal relationships, particularly the physical, sexual, and emotional abuse of children. Clearly, this is a dangerous trend for society.

The tragedy is that the same defenses that enable us to survive the emotional pain of childhood and existential despair not only limit our personal potential for living a full life, but they inevitably lead to negative behaviors toward others, perpetuating the cycle of destructiveness.